Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers

Initially, the characters in FSW: Ten Hammers were meant to be more central to the game's story. Since you can control up to four teams, you'll have more than 32 characters to manage, not just eight. Soldiers die and are replaced, and the dynamic of collecting the wounded is entirely different than before. Instead of sending out a whole team to collect a wounded soldier, which was very dangerous, you can now send a single soldier to collect a wounded one and, while you send in suppressive fire, command him back to your squad. If you don't collect them in time, they won't just appear in the next mission. They'll die. At the game's end, you'll be able to read bios on every one of the characters to see what happened to them, adding yet another touch of elegant realism.

To be honest, since the story falls flat you're less likely to care about their fate. It's not so much a story as it is a narrative of missions that end up in their place. The characters don't feel like they have much more personality than before, and the constant chatter among team members wasn't heightened with smarter, funnier or more poignant dialog. If anything, you'll realize you'll hear these words hundreds of thousands of times: Corner! Move! Alpha! Bravo! Get Moving! ad nauseum. There is one very cool team leader, an African-American dude with a M203 grenade launcher, who says the coolest things. Oh yeah, you'll also hear an enormous amount of foul language while playing. But about mid-way through the game, you'll want them to stop talking all together.

The bigger, wider multiplayer modes are good fun, as long as the single-player issues don't wear you down first -- because they do bleed into the multiplayer modes. Players will get to fight in totally new adversarial maps as they follow objective-type missions. One team takes on the US, the other, the OpFors. And unlike the first Xbox game, you will be able to play on SysLink. The adversarial addition is huge for this game. It adds another full layer of human-to-human competition and increased replay value. The two-player cooperative play is also excellent, though there is no split-screen option. It's strange that the Xbox enables eight players while the PC limits you to six. You'd think the PC would allow for more. The PS2 opts for even fewer than the PC, maxing out at four players, which stinks.

The new OpFors are fun to experiment with. They're a little faster, leaner, and stealthier than the US soldiers, who have heavier weapons and travel in teams. Their play style is different: you'll have to move fast and a lot. They add a good deal of variety to the game pretty much assuring you of great skirmishes and smack-talking battles. In multiplayer fights, however, you'll have to find people who know what they're doing, since the game isn't kind to noobs online. It's best to play with friends.

The Verdict

Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers is a good sequel that's worth looking at if you enjoyed the first one. The multiple teams, added tanks, verticality, precision fire, the stepped-up AI, and the much-needed multiplayer modes are all smart, value-added features.

The game doesn't, however, advance much once you get going. With the exception of harder levels, you feel like you're playing very similar mission types with no real feeling of progression. The level designs are actually more interesting than in the first, but there is still so much repetition, so little feeling of advancement, growth, or evolution that each level feels like the last one. The controls also pose the same problem as before, only there are more, and the enemy is more aggressive and moves more often and faster. You, of course, have more weapons in your arsenal, but things like shooting an enemy in motion and having no solution to up-close combat would have been really nice.

As it is, FSW: Ten Hammers is a good game with similar problems returning from the original. All of the new features really serve to please the original hardcore gamers, rather than open the game up to any potential new ones. Still, if you want hardcore strategy and military sim gaming, this is for you.